ously
reflected. I know that what we do is for the happiness of the peoples.
In two words: Popery drives to celibacy, the Reformation establishes the
family. It is time to rid France of her monks, to restore their lands to
the Crown, who will, sooner or later, sell them to the burghers. Let us
learn to die for our children, and make our families some day free and
prosperous."

The face of the young enthusiast, that of Chaudieu, that of the sailor,
that of the stranger seated in the bow, lighted by the last gleams of
the twilight, formed a picture which ought the more to be described
because the description contains in itself the whole history of the
times--if it is, indeed, true that to certain men it is given to sum up
in their own persons the spirit of their age.

The religious reform undertaken by Luther in Germany, John Knox in
Scotland, Calvin in France, took hold especially of those minds in
the lower classes into which thought had penetrated. The great lords
sustained the movement only to serve interests that were foreign to the
religious cause. To these two classes were added adventurers, ruined
noblemen, younger sons, to whom all troubles were equally acceptable.
But among the artisan and merchant classes the new faith was sincere and
based on calculation. The masses of the poorer people adhered at once
to a religion which gave the ecclesiastical property to the State,
and deprived the dignitaries of the Church of their enormous revenues.
Commerce everywhere reckoned up the profits of this religious operation,
and devoted itself body, soul, and purse, to the cause.

But among the young men of the French bourgeoisie the Protestant
movement found that noble inclination to sacrifices of all kinds which
inspires youth, to which selfishness is, as yet, unknown. Eminent men,
sagacious minds, discerned the Republic in the Reformation; they desired
to establish throughout Europe the government of the United
Provinces, which ended by triumphing over the greatest Power of those
times,--Spain, under Philip the Second, represented in the Low Countries
by the Duke of Alba. Jean Hotoman was then meditating his famous book,
in which this project is put forth,--a book which spread throughout
France the leaven of these ideas, which were stirred up anew by the
Ligue, repressed by Richelieu, then by Louis XIV., always protected by
the younger branches, by the house of Orleans in 1789, as by the house
of Bourbon in 1589. Whoso